Finding the Form with Mark Anthony Jarman

This story comes out of very rough notes I wrote 40 years earlier, flimsy onionskin pages I recently found in a folder when cleaning out my UNB office (an extremely slow exit). The notes were from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was at the Iowa Workshop, then Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate NY, then Seattle and western Canada, and traveling many roads between those very different points. Hence the jumps in geographical and geological references.

Yaddo is a grand mansion, but I was flat broke, would put a group tab on my Visa card, collect cash from everyone for the bill, and live on that cash. John Cheever wrote a lot at Yaddo; I had a stripped copy of his Collected Stories with me, and I joked I also had his old-fashioned black metal lunchbox. Yaddo provides artists with breakfast and dinner in the mansion’s impressive dining room, but lunch was carried back to your room to keep the day free for work on projects. A night owl, I rarely made it to breakfast, so the black lunchbox was my breakfast.

I’m sure some pages were typed on an old electric typewriter I had at my parents’ house. Its letter E had come loose and was held by tape, but the letter had a mind of its own. Like musical notation, the E moved higher and higher on the page as I typed madly until the E flew across the room. I’d stop, find the errant letter E, and apply new Scotch tape.

“At first, I thought of a series of postcard stories, but the story, like the letter E, had a life of its own, the narrative morphing and growing into a much longer piece that quickly became the story ‘The Bodies.'”

I can tell that some notes in the folder are aimed at my novel Salvage King Ya, but others are clearly miscellaneous, not aimed anywhere, just the collections of a young magpie. Youthful diaries or stories are often embarrassing, and these notes are haphazard and rough, but when I found them, I saw fresh images and lines and characters and hope I’d be able to do something with all the pages.

At first, I thought of a series of postcard stories, but the story, like the letter E, had a life of its own, the narrative morphing and growing into a much longer piece that quickly became the story “The Bodies.” The process was not planned at all, and the writing and linking of many different parts went faster than expected, inducing some minor writerly guilt.

Some of the notes are biographical or about people I knew, and some are complete fiction, and the parts become mixed up, as happens to anyone writing. The tractor at the dump and paddlewheel boat by the lake are from my childhood. The herons and dangerous horses and the topless woman chasing a man with a whip or lunge-line are 100% true, and I hope the rural slapstick elements work, though someone wielding a whip is not always seen as comic or affectionate.

After my stays in Iowa and Yaddo, a summer job working on my brother-in-law’s Rick’s road-crew in the Rocky Mountains allowed me to pay off my hefty Visa bill. That fall I started teaching part-time in Calgary and the folder of notes moved with me, job to job, city to city, coast to coast, hidden for years, but becoming a thoughtful gift from my younger self, a present that waited four decades to arrive.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, he is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.

Photo by Tibor Pinter on Unsplash